I think that racism is a belief that your race is better than another, not some kind of subconscious preference or inadvertent action or omission. If you’re a racist, you know it and proclaim it. There is nothing subliminal about it.

I am convinced that there is no longer such a thing as white privilege. I have lost several college and job opportunities because the opposite is actually true.

I don’t think that handing hardworking people’s earnings to lazy people is going to solve anything.

I see Welfare as slavery.

I see Social Security as a ponzi scheme. It needs to end, especially with the current low US birth rates.

I think that any taxation is partial slavery. If your income is taxed at 30%, you are 30% a slave, i.e. working 30% of your year for no pay.

I believe that taking earnings from the hardworking should only be done in the most dire circumstances.

I think that any legislation that regulates the healthcare, lending, banking, auto manufacturing, etc. system is anti free trade.

I think trade unions exist to cripple productivity, steal from businesses, and foment (yes, I said the word foment) Socialism.

While we’re on the subject, Socialism is just legalized stealing. Taking from “the rich” is just stealing for those too lazy to break in and plunder for themselves.

For any and all of these fundamental beliefs I would be called a hater, and probably shouted down on any college campus. My only hope is that there are a few others who can see this position is just fundamental right and wrong, and not based on hate. In truth, I hate no one. I just feel that everyone should leave people alone and stop looking for ways to get their hands into our wallets.

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I learned photography in high school with a Vivitar 220 35mm film camera and numerous rolls of black and white film. They had color film back then, but developing and printing it in a high school darkroom was not workable in 1978.

You may be thinking… What use in this digital age is a lesson about 1978 black and white film photography? Hold on. There is a usable lesson here.

One day we were assigned to shoot landscapes and my teacher taught us this. Look at a black and white photo, and you’ll notice that a sunny blue sky is almost always completely washed out to a complete blank. This makes our photos – well – boring. What you want is to darken that blue sky down – not to black, just to give it a little more detail. He told us we could use a red color filter (or red cellophane, or the red plastic off a broken LED clock) to accomplish this. This caused even the whispiest clouds to pop out in the photo and become interesting.

I will show you how to do this in GIMP.

First, my original photo from my iPhone. Nothing special, just a shot from my morning walk.

Nothing too amazing, now in GIMP, I will desaturate it.

Note that the sky and clouds are kinda washed out. This effect was MUCH WORSE in 35mm film photography.

Now, I used this filter on the original color image…

…making sure to set all 3 settings (shadows, midtones, highlights) to 0, -100, -100. I took the resulting red image and used desaturate on it again…

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Advertisers are free to spend money wherever they want. It’s their money and if they don’t want to associate with your viewpoint, that’s their prerogative.

Youtube (Google) does not owe you a living.

if there are no advertisers willing to sponsor you, then either…

make your stuff for free

change to be more attractive to sponsors

stop making content

get your own sponsors

Yes, this is a bonehead move on Youtube’s part, but it’s their platform. Unless your agreement says, “we will pay you to create any kind of content you want”, then they can do anything they like within the framework of the agreement you both entered into.

It’s not censorship. Post whatever opinion you like (within the TOS). But they don’t owe you money for it.

I suspect that there are some advertisers who would love to align themselves with edgy content – unless your views are really, really wackadoo. Sure it won’t be Coke or Sprint, but I bet there are some – why don’t YOU cultivate these relationships?

As TJ Kirk said, “The beauty of it is that Youtube deals with the advertisers and content creators never have to talk to them.” Well yeah, until something like this happens.

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“He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.” – Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and evil

After a decade of sadness and woe, I feel as though I have been staring into an abyss. Not with the noble intent of destroying evil, but with the sense that all-enveloping hopelessness is all there is to life. I ceased to fear and dread death. Death is an end to pointlessness and irrelevance.

I know that if I turn around, if I turn my back on the abyss, there is life. There can be happiness. The misery can – if not end – abate somewhat. There are people who love me, but not in the way I want. There are things worth striving for, but I feel destined to fail at them all. The only future I can foresee is loneliness and despair.

The monsters I fight do not kill. They merely steal life. Each day of hopelessness, futility and despair is a meal to them, they cannot get enough. Even the days when I rail angrily about it feeds them, because my uselessness prevails. I accomplish nothing. I do not advance. I gain no life, no energy, no manna. I devote my life to meaningless pursuits that come with no risk and no reward. Video games, MMOs, Netflix, Politics.

My bills go unpaid, my work goes undone, my clients are cheated. I have talent, but no reason to excel. Hopelessness prevails. The evil I face is like a dementor, sucking the life and strength from my bones, leaving only a drooling husk. The more I think about turning it around, the more I am reminded that I have already lost a decade. Opportunity has tired of knocking on my door, and may soon forget my address altogether. I feel sometimes as though I have missed my boat.

But let me tell you a secret. That’s what the monsters want me to think. There is a spark, somewhere that cannot be extinguished. Like a firefly in the forest of Fangorn. Like a distress beacon in the bottomless vastness of space. The monsters can’t find it and even if they could, they cannot extinguish it. The best they can do is distract me and hope I will not see it. But what they don’t realize is that the darker they make my mind, the brighter the spark is – and that much easier to find.

Do I believe that there are actual evil beings that seek destruction and ruin for me and humankind? Yes, actually but that doesn’t change a thing. The answer I need is in that spark, that will to go on, that drive to prevail. I am now old. I my days are numbered (but they always were, really). I may not be able to fan this spark into an ember, the ember to a flame, and the flame to a bonfire. But I know this. NO MATTER WHAT HAPPENS, it is there. There is always opportunity. My soul just needs the nourishment to seize it.

I used to blame God for letting me get here, and not lifting me out of it when I cried. But the truth is that I didn’t seek Him while I was descending this infernal ladder, so it’s not His job to pull me out. He gave me the spark, that’s all I need. I hope (yes I have found some small hope) that someday He will be proud of me for climbing all the way out of this personal Hell.

I want this to be understood.

My wife did not put me here.

“Liberals” did not put me here.

Having financial burdens didn’t put me here.

My kids did not put me here.

Reverse racism did not put me here.

I put me here.

I may winge about some of those things from time to time, but ultimately I am the one who saw the face of the abyss and surrendered. I am the one who sat down. I am the one that stopped rowing. And I am the one who needs to pick up and move on. No matter the cost. No matter the pain.

“Pain is always there, because life is freaking painful, OK? But suffering is a choice.” – Pennsatucky, Orange is the New Black

I have a feeling. A notion that energy will beget energy. That if I can muster enough wattage in a day to propel myself even an inch forward, I might build up the momentum to keep going. I dare dream that I might even have enough time left to achieve some measure of greatness. To not die a pauper clutching a worthless, broken guitar under an overpass.

This hope, this Godly spark, lives in all mankind. Even in atheists. You may think it comes from random chemicals or Gaia, or the universe, but it is there. You can go on. You can choose to use it or not. It’s your move. God is with you. Who can stand against you?

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MIlo Yiannopoulos was un-vited from speaking at CPAC, lost his book deal, and forced to quit his job at Breitbart News.

What was his crime?

It was speaking on a podcast a year ago in such a way that when heavily edited, seemed like he supported pedophilia.

None of this is true – Milo detests pedophiles, but the damage is done, the left has won.

I have never understood this. People can devote their love and energy to a cause or job for decades, but commit one wrong move (or in Milo’s case only appear to have committed a wrong move) and that’s it. You’ll never work again.

There was a time when I offended someone at work. I was notified by management that I had done something to offend someone.

“Wow. I had no idea. Who was it?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

“Well then what did I do or say?”

“You should know that.”

“I don’t.”

Look, I am a christian, and was at the time a republican, but pretty quiet about those things in the workplace. But given the number of times when a public person lost everything for an off-color comment in a bar, I wanted to go and smooth things over with whoever complained, and make peace. I have a family, and my job was important to me.

But they didn’t want peace. They wanted me to shut up and work. They wanted me to live in fear that something I might say to someone might get me fired and blacklisted in my industry. Furthermore, when politics or religion came up they wanted me to quietly listen as my side was bashed and ridiculed.

This had the expected result. I now couldn’t be sure who was so small that they had taken a trivial comment to management. I stopped going to lunch with everyone. I never chatted about anything non-task-related with anyone. I became a miserable old hermit in my dark little cube. I also sold all my company stock options. That was my little dig at them.

There is no cure for this sickness. There is no way to fight a nameless, faceless hatred that refuses to stand up and face us like real people. I weep for western culture.

To all my current and future coworkers: I vow that if I am offended by anything you do or say, I will respond in one of two ways.

I will talk to you face to face about it.

I will let it slide, though I may seethe for a little while about it.

I will never, ever go to management to anonymously shut you down and possibly get you fired though. That’s just cowardly.

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Well, maybe not a million, but I have to say that of all the software I have *cough* purchased, the engineers at the irritation factory known as Intuit seem hell bent on making my user experience as nasty as inhumanly possible.

Quickbooks fails about 80% of the time to create PDFs to attach to emails.

Quickbooks uses your email client to send emails instead of sending emails directly, and that fails about 99% of the time. This is divided into the times when it tells you it can’t send an email and the times it says nothing, yet no email ever arrives at the client.

It bundles 10,000 features (many of which are paid add-ons, like payroll) and small businesses like me need about 5.

It’s constantly trying to up-sell me on additional services.

It seems to cost extra to do many simple features, even ones you rarely need.

Even though you bought Quickbooks, you don’t own it.

Features start disabling after it’s 2 years old.

You can’t move an older working version to a new computer. Well, you *can*, but when it tries to install all the patches, they are no longer available.

It frequently freezes up or just takes a long time to complete a task, during which the UI is unresponsive, sometimes making the whole computer seem locked up.

When there is an error, they leave it to the community users to help one another. I’m sure there is some kind of support add-on where you can pay more to get access to a useless knowledge-base or something, but I’m already paying $400 for $65 worth of features.

New one today: it just emailed ALL my client’s invoices to one client.

In short Quickbooks is irritating, annoying, expensive, and difficult. I am sensing room for an alternative solution.

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In 1979, I could not get into any college because women and minorities went to the front of the line. So I went to technical school.

I have a Spanish surname, and sometimes companies that hire me erase the “white, not Hispanic” on the EOE form and check “Hispanic”, even though I am only 1/4 Hispanic at most.

I was once told by an employment broker that he could place me right now if I would check the Hispanic and Female boxes, but since I didn’t I would have to face the screening.

I am not eligible for women-and-minority owned business loans.

I was advised to put my wife’s name on all my business licenses so I could be more eligible for city, county, and state contracts.

I have never received a job, contract, raise, or bonus because I am white.

I have never been contacted and asked to join a white guys club, or advised to do something to help out the white race.

I don’t hang with nor do I know anyone who ever thinks about how to suppress other races. In general, the white guys I know just want to work hard and better themselves and their families.

I have never owned a slave.

I don’t know anyone who has ever been a slave.

I have done alright for myself, despite the crappy public education that tried to teach me to hate myself and submit for emotional and verbal flogging because of some perceived injustice someone else did generations ago.

So basically, my white privilege has gotten me extra taxes and fewer opportunities all my life.

My income has been stolen and used against my will to prop up policies that seriously harm minorities and women, break down the family, encourage sloth and illegal activity.

When I hear white men being shut down with the phrase, “check your privilege”, I am inclined to laugh. You snowflakes have no standing to say that unless you walk in our shoes. There.

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Broadly speaking, there are 2. Everyone is born with one. Anything more is delusional.

As far as your gender is concerned:

What you present as means nothing.

What you emotionally feel means even less.

Ponies are not and never will be a gender.

No amount of surgery will change your DNA, which is where your gender stems from.

That said:

No one, no matter how delusional, should be harmed because of their crazy.

No one deserves money from anyone who does not buy into their crazy.

No person deserves to be trapped by a tranny, even if it’s a big part of the trannys fantasy. It is cruel to lie to people to gain their affection. Men and women who want biological families do not deserve to be trapped by delusional trannies who pretend they can fulfill that, while they know they can’t.

It’s OK to love trannies and treat them like people. They deserve every bit as much voluntary love as any other person.

Love is voluntary. You can’t beat it out of people against their will, or write laws forcing people to love anyone.

No one deserves to be beat up or killed for their views. This includes:

Trannies

Baptists

Muslims

Democrats

Republicans

Men

Women

Kids

Actors

Trump Supporters

You have the right to believe you are anything you like. You have no right to force your pronouns or delusions on anyone else. If you think this, then I believe I am the God-Emperor of the West. You will address me as “Your Majesty”. Also there will be much genuflecting.

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So Donald Trump issued an executive order calling for enhanced screening of people from the 7 ‘states’ where terrorists are trained. This would have the effect of delaying some people at port-of-entry, unless they are problematic in some way.

There are 57 Muslim states, and only 7 are on the list: the ones that train terrorists. So if you read “Ban On Muslims” somewhere, that was fake news.

ISIS is an offshoot of a religion, not a race, so if you read that this was racism, that was fake news.

The protestors who are raising a stink about this are paid rabble-rousers, so if you read that there is any kind of groundswell, that’s fake news too. These people for the right money would support Florida Orange Juice or chocolate train tracks.

CNN and Buzzfeed, who both ran with fake stories about Donald Trump’s imaginary romp with Russian hookers, have shown gross journalistic incompetence (or perhaps a Pravda-level agitprop status) and join the ranks of fake news sites with 60 minutes, who was caught getting witnesses to change their stories, and even ran the George Bush fake National Guard memos to fit their preconceived narrative.

There are only a few news sources to be trusted anymore, and none of them are in the ranks of what anyone would call the mainstream media.

Of course, if you are a liberal, or SJW Snowflake, and alignment matters more than truth to you, then feel free to construct any world-view you like out of wood, straw, and playing cards. Just be forewarned that it’s all gonna burn in the face of relentless truth.

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Tilting at Windmills

There is a mean person who was elected president. He planned to evict all gay married couples, sending jack-booted police to pummel kind, loving partners apart and force them to marry the disgusting members of the opposite sex. He planned to – in full Nazi style – test all the people of the land for genetic purity, and shove the unworthy out into the sea, or across the border to Mexico.

He woke up in the morning and dreamed of oppressing any man who wished he was a girl and and girl who wished she was a guy. He had a 4,000 year old redwood cut down to make a high-grade pen so he could close down welfare and social security and make the old people work as slaves until they die.

He met with secret organizations to make sure only the wealthiest white families could send their white sons to college, and only if they paid millions for the privilege. He had horses’ heads put in the beds of his rivals and dissenters. He ate baby seals and shot polar bears for fun.

He had his construction companies build a giant wall – bigger than the great wall of China – and stationed right-wing bearded wackos every 50 feet in towers with beer, corn chips, giant piles of armor-piercing ammo, and orders to shoot any poor or helpless children they saw.

He rounded up the impure and tossed them off the wall into Mexico and told them to run before the guards opened fire.

This man is pure evil. People – helpless humanitarian people – rioted and protested and (for some unknown reason ) looted to make this man stop. This man, this awful man elected by reactionary, stupid neanderthals, had to be stopped at all costs.

This man hates women despite having a wonderful, smart wife and daughter. He thinks of them all as sex objects and likes to randomly humiliate them for no reason. He thinks women are best when chained to a stove or ironing board, and shouldn’t be allowed to go to school or vote.

There is just one problem. This man, this Donald Trope, is pure fiction. He is an incoherent concoction of lies and memes. The liars know that soon it will be revealed that the real man is not this 10-eyed flaming demon they have constructed, and they have an urgent need to whip their idiots into a frenzy before the whole construct comes tumbling down. There is an Armageddon coming for these people, but it’s only their concept of reality, not reality itself that is going to burn this time.

Well, once their useful idiots finish burning things to the ground.

Reality Check

If you think the real guy is going to round up all LGBTQ(plus whatever letters get added this week) and make them break up, step back from your anger. It’s not going to happen.

If you’re worried that McDonald’s is not going to let transgenders into the wrong bathroom, or that they won’t be force to create a separate restroom for each of the 27 defined genders, then chill. Work in your state to get whatever action you need. The president has more important things to do. Hillary wasn’t going to address this either.

If you think that opposing gay marriage equals hate of gay people, relax. It’s not hate to disagree about what marriage is. It’s just opinion.

If you think that stopping people from illegally crossing the border is racism, have your head examined. It’s the job of nations to protect their people. They can’t do that in an open-border world. If you disagree, take all the outside doors and windows off your house, or you’re a hypocrite. It’s not racism to protect your people. All nations do it. The ones that didn’t are not nations anymore.

If you think that Muslim refugees don’t need to be allowed to immigrate carefully, then have them move in by you. We’ll make sure they are not screened at all. As for me, I have daughters, and I would really not like the thought of my neighborhood filling up with terrorist jihadists. By the way, Islam is not a race. It isn’t racism to watch and/or carefully screen them.

On this topic, why are you so anxious to have so many of them come here? Do you want the murders, rapes, and terror attacks? It sure seems that way when viewed from the right.

If you think he is going to cut Medicare, look at what the ACA did. It redirected a large chunk of medicare funds to itself. In essence, Medicare is already raided.

Relax

Remember, the real man has donated money to Democrats. He lived in New York. He is not as conservative as you fear. The real man wants repeal and replace. I am not happy with that, I think the free market can do better. The real man is not putting tea-partiers into all the key jobs. Not even close. He seems to be walking a more moderate, reasonable path. Though it’s only been one day in reality, so we’ll have to see.

So turn off your fear and hate, stop watching fake news like CNN (when a news organization vows to take a president down, how fair can they really be?). Engage your eyes and ears and mind. Think about what is actually being done, and not what you fear might happen next.

When Clinton and Obama were elected, the right was demoralized and angry, just like you are now. Our fears were far greater than the reality we ended up facing. Some wacko right-wing bloggers made dire predictions and even promoted lies and rumors about them. The mainstream right rejected these wackos and watched what actually happened before they made judgments and formulated opposition. It’s the only reasonable way to be.